Sunday, September 1, 2013

Roland Integra-7 Mini Review

The Integra-7 is a great module! Loaded with lots of legacy and new sounds. If you make techno or want to emulate an acoustic style this provides an all in one solution. I found myself liking this one from the get-go. Its not hard to learn or navigate. Most everything can be found within a few button presses or some rotation of the knobs. The sound is extremely high quality and will fill your musical needs for the most part. The reason to get this is that it will foster creative music writing. Scrolling through different voices will be inspiring.

There were some downsides to using it though. The volume knob isn't sensitive enough to use as an audio interface. Also the audio coming back from the computer had fake highs. It is like a sample conversion problem, or low bandwidth. So using this as your only audio interface is not a good idea, until they fix that. This one is best off as a straight module.

Pluses:

Good Electric Pianos, Guitars, And Strings

High Quality Effects

Motional Surround sounds realistic with the right settings

Most of the instruments are useable

Lots of sounds

The DAW plugin is fun

Works as an audio interface. You can even process sound from your computer with Motional Surround.

Cons:

Could use more inputs for surround mixing if you needed it.

Volume could be more gradual

Edit button could probably be closer to the shift button

Audio from computer was incorrect or buggy.

If you need a module, this is obviously the only one you may ever need. Sure there are cheesy sounds in here, most notably the brass, but overall I think I liked it. It has some decent digital basses too. It gets a solid A from me.